The poetry publisher duration press has put online the first of its new critical e-book series, towards a foreign likeness bent: translation (pdf). It contains fifteen essays, from Ammiel Alcalay’s “Politics & Translation” to Chet Wiener’s “The Legacy and Future of ‘Horizontal’ and ‘Vertical’ Translation in Contemporary Poetry,” of which (I regret to say) too many are marred (for me) by an excess of politics, theory, and/or self-indulgence. But at least two are worth downloading the book to read, Jonathan Skinner’s “A Note On Trobar” (followed by a selection of his own translations, “Petit Chansonnier: Provençal Lyrics”) and Rick Snyder’s “The Politics of Time: New American Versions of Paul Celan.” The first begins:

While it is a commonplace that the troubadours “invented” (or found) the art of love (whose key words we all know well—vernal, auzel [bird], dona, pretz [worth], amors, cor, remirar [glance], dezir, joi, sofrirs, mezura, servir, merce, lauzengier [slanderer], senhal [nickname]), the formal, lyric specificity of that invention has been lost to us. What was unique about the troubadour canso was its secular artifice, its engagement with social and linguistic particulars in an ideal vernacular, a koine relatively free of (Latin) ecclesiastical and juridical control while also not particularly tied to local dialects. The troubadours elaborated a frankly sexual (and, I might add, social) sensibility in a “field of rhyme” with little compare in the history of Western literature—in fact, Occitan rhyme’s likely connections with Arabic and Hebrew poetry, in forms including the Mozarabic zagal and muwashshah, remain relatively unexplored to this day. (Indigenous influences such as refrain songs associated with the round dance have been considered more important.)

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Cerdis zerom deronty toulpinye,
Purois harlins linor orifieux,
Tictic falo mien estolieux,
Eulfiditons lafar relonglotye.
Gerefeluz tourdom redassinye;
Ervidion tecar doludrieux,
Gesdoliou nerset bacincieux,
Arlas destol osart lurafirie.
Tast derurly tast qu’ent derontrian,
Tast deportulast fal min adian,
Tast tast causus renula dulpissoitre,
Ladimirail reledra survioux,
C’est mon secret ma Mignonne aux yeux doux,
Qu’autre que toy ne sauroit reconnoistre.
—Marc Papillon, seigneur de Lasphrise (1597)

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Tae Kim‘s A Japanese guide to Japanese grammar “was created as a resource for those who want to learn Japanese grammar in a rational, intuitive way that makes sense in Japanese. The explanations are focused on how to make sense of the grammar not from English but from a Japanese point of view.” The Introduction says:

The problem with conventional textbooks is that they often have the following goals.
1. They want readers to be able to use functional and polite Japanese as quickly as possible.
2. They don’t want to scare readers away with terrifying Japanese script and Chinese characters.
3. They want to teach you how to say English phrases in Japanese…
This guide is an attempt to systematically build up the grammatical structures that make up the Japanese language in a way that makes sense in Japanese. It may not be a practical tool for quickly learning immediately useful Japanese phrases (for example, common phrases for travel). However, it will logically create grammatical building blocks that will result in a solid grammatical foundation. For those of you who have learned Japanese from textbooks, you may see some big differences in how the material is ordered and presented. This is because this guide does not seek to forcibly create artificial ties between English and Japanese by presenting the material in a way that makes sense in English. Instead, examples with translations will show how ideas are expressed in Japanese resulting in simpler explanations that are easier to understand.

That makes a lot of sense to me, and if I ever decide to really learn Japanese, I think I’ll give it a try. (Via Plep.)

Still on my colonial history kick, I’m reading Jill Lepore’s The Name of War, about the worst conflict in early American history, King Philip’s War of 1675-76 (although, as she says, “Its very name, each word in its title—’King,’ ‘Philip’s,’ ‘War’—has been passionately disputed”). I checked it out of the Athenaeum because I couldn’t resist the title of Chapter 1, “Beware of Any Linguist,” and I’m glad I did—I’ve found all kinds of goodies just in the introduction, “What’s in a Name?” The first one I want to share is this discussion of the name of the eponymous Wampanoag leader:

It is possible that Philip called himself “Philip” when addressing the English and “Metacom” when talking with Indians. But it seems more likely that he simply abandoned the name Metacom after 1660. After all, Philip was raised in a culture in which people commonly adopted new names, leaving old names behind. Edward Winslow had observed in 1624, “All their names are significant and variable, for when they come to the state of men and women, they alter them according to their deeds or dispositions.” For just this reason, it is possible that Philip renamed himself during the war, to mark a new stage in his life, but surely he would not have returned to Metacom, the name of his youth. That no record of Philip’s new name survives should come as no surprise. Those who knew Philip by the name he went by at the time of his death, in August 1676, would not have uttered it: a strict naming taboo prohibited it. As Roger Williams had reported, “the naming of their dead Sachims, is one ground of their warres”; in 1665 Philip himself had traveled to Nantucket to kill an Indian who had spoken the name of his deceased father, Massasoit. If Philip took another name during the war, it has not survived. (Although one small, uncorroborated bit of evidence suggests that he may have been renamed “Wewesawamit.”) And, since he seems to have initially taken “Philip” in earnest, calling him “Metacom” today is no truer to his memory, especially because “Metacom” became a became a popular substitute for “Philip” only in the early nineteenth century, when white playwrights, poets, and novelists sought to make the war sound more authentically, and romantically, Indian.

I love this kind of detailed discussion. And something that completely delighted me was discovering the reason he was given the name Philip when he and his brother asked the Plymouth Court for new names after their father died:

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Reading Jonathan Franzen’s annoyingly self-absorbed “My Bird Problem” [archived] in the latest New Yorker, one reason I kept going was the profusion of wonderful bird names: gadwall, veery, redstart, dunlin… Then I hit “parauque” (at the bottom of the middle column on page 66, if you’re following along at home) and thought I’d better look it up so I’d know whether to mentally pronounce it as if it were French or Spanish. Well, it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, so of course I googled it, and was suprised to find only a few hundred hits—bird names shouldn’t be that rare. Following my usual practice with unfamiliar plants and animals, I googled the Linnean name, in this case Nyctidromus albicollis, and what do you know, every hit gave the English name as “pauraque.” So I googled that, and sure enough, there were over 15,000 hits, and when I looked it up in my massive Webster’s Third New International, there it was (pronounced \pau‘räkā\ in their transcription, like “pow RAH kay”). The New Yorker had allowed a misspelled word into their once famously perfect pages. Once again, the modern world had let me down.

I was a bit consoled, or at least distracted, when I followed the trail left by Webster’s laconic definition (pauraque n [MexSp] : CUIEJO) and looked up cuiejo. I was rewarded with this:

cuiejo \kü‘yāhō\ n [modif. of AmerSp cuyeo] : a tropical American nighthawk (Nyctidromus albicollis) the dried and ground bones of which are highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion — called also pauraque

“Highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion”—why, it’s lexicographical poetry! And the endearingly awkward phrasing “the dried and ground bones of which,” contorted to avoid the perfectly good “whose dried and ground bones,” was the icing on the cake.

Later in the same paragraph Franzen mentions “my first northern beardless tyrannulet”; I liked “tyrannulet” very much but was unable to find it in any dictionaries: not Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, not the big Webster’s, not the OED. And yet it’s an English word in good standing; not only does it get 20,000 Google hits (besides the northern beardless, this page lists dozens of others: Rufous-lored, Cinnamon-faced, Minas Gerais, Oustalet’s, Mottle-cheeked, Rough-legged, Greenish, Tawny-rumped…) [June 2020: the Wayback Machine has no record of that page, but this Wikipedia Category page has quite a few], it’s the subject of an Encyclopædia Britannica article. So why isn’t it in the dictionary, not even the OED? I’m mystified and annoyed; at least the pronunciation is clear, but what if it weren’t? I’d be lost in the sea of words without a compass!

Horatio Hale’s The Iroquois Book of Rites (Gutenberg text of entire book, Sacred Texts version broken up into chapters), originally published in 1883, contains all sorts of historical and cultural information about the Five (later Six) Nations of the Iroquois; its centerpiece is the Ancient Rites of the Condoling Council in both Iroquois and English (preceded by a sketch of The Iroquois Language). Here’s the famous Condolence Hymn chanted at meetings of the League:

Kayanerenh deskenonghweronne;
Kheyadawenh deskenonghweronne;
Oyenkondonh deskenonghweronne;
Wakonnyh deskenonghweronne.
Ronkeghsotah rotirighwane,—
Ronkeghsota jiyathondek.

I come again to greet and thank the League;
I come again to greet and thank the kindred;
I come again to greet and thank the warriors;
I come again to greet and thank the women.
My forefathers,—what they established,
My forefathers,—hearken to them!

The Tensor has a convenient list of English words derived from Latin words with the diminutive -culus suffix; he adds:

The oddest one I found was muscle, which comes from the diminutive of mus ‘mouse’. According to the OED, this bit of oddness comes down to us from Indo-European: “The word for mouse also has the sense ‘muscle’ (esp. of the upper arm) in many Indo-European languages, e.g. Middle Dutch, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Icelandic, ancient and Hellenistic Greek, post-classical Latin, and Armenian [woo-hoo!], app. because of the resemblance of a flexing muscle to the movements made by a mouse.”

(The bracketed excitement about Armenian is his, not mine.) He also includes “a few words that I would have guessed contained -culus, but don’t.”

According to an article in Der Standard (seconded by a badly written Moscow News story), the city of Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk, near where Karamzin, the inventor of the letter, was born) is planning to erect a stone monument to honor the letter ё [yo], which has long been ousted from official Russian documents. The Wikipedia article on the letter says “The fact that yo is frequently replaced with ye in print often causes some confusion to non-Russians, as it makes Russian words and names harder to transcribe accurately,” but according to an impassioned plea for its use (by E. Pchelov and V. Chumakov), it confuses Russians too, so that some say Chebyshev for the correct Chebyshov (Чебышёв) and routinely mispronounce foreign names. One statement in their article struck me: is it true that Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard,” known to Russians these days as Вишнёвый сад [vishnyóvyi sad], should actually be Вишневый сад [víshnyevyi sad]? Perhaps Avva, a proponent and user of the letter, will know. (Thanks for the tip, Adam!)

Update (2010). Thanks to a question from MMcM in this thread, I have investigated and learned that the statue was actually built; it says here that the winner of the competition to design it was Alexander Zinin, a local artist who decided to base his design on the form of the letter as it first appeared in print on page 166 of Karamzin’s almanac Aonidy in 1797 (in the word слёзы ‘tears’), and you can see an image here.

I just got an Amazon package with some books I’ve wanted for a long time (thanks, Prentiss!), including Basil Bunting’s Complete Poems (mentioned here). I already had his Collected Poems, Bunting’s own selection, but this adds forty pages of uncollected work, including such fine poems as his little elegy for Lorine Niedecker:

To abate what swells
use ice for scalpel.
It melts in its wound
and no one can tell
what the surgeon used.
Clear lymph, no scar,
no swathe from a cheek’s bloom.

But what I’m here to discuss is the last of the “Uncollected Odes”:

      Dentdale conversation

Yan tan tethera pethera pimp
nothing to waste but nothing to skimp.
Lambs and gimmers and wethers and ewes
what do you want with political views?
Keep the glass in your windows clear
where nothing whatever’s bitter but beer.

Catchy first line, no? Ponder it for a while and guess what it means; then go below the fold and I’ll tell you.

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A comment by Ghil’ad Zuckermann on my post about his views on Israeli (Hebrew) sent me looking for more information about Dola Wittmann, the oldest native Israeli-speaker (in April 2000; I’m afraid she’s probably passed on by now). I found a very interesting column by Sam Orbaum, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, called “Daughter of the mother tongue”:

Dola learned the language from her father [Eliezer Ben-Yehuda], who reinvented it… During my first of numerous chats with Dola, about 15 years ago, our hours-long interview was interjected by occasional “harumphs.” Every time she dipped into another language for a bon mot, her husband Max voiced his displeasure. “You can say that very well in Hebrew too,” he grumbled.

Max, who passed away a few years ago, was actually more stalwart a devotee of Ben-Yehuda than even Dola. Worldly and cosmopolitan, Dola readily spoke other languages as well. Max adamantly refused.

When Max asked for Ben-Yehuda’s permission to marry his daughter, his answer, she recalled, was: “I will grant permission dependent on your answer to two questions: Will you live in Eretz Yisrael, and will you only speak Hebrew?” Max promised to do both—and true yekke that he was, never, ever compromised his promise.

It did not even concern Ben-Yehuda that Max was Christian—and German to boot. He pointedly did not ask Max to convert (he never did). “Speaking Hebrew, and speaking it here, was all that mattered,” Dola explained. “Since then, I never left the country for any reason,” Max said proudly, “and never spoke anything but Hebrew.”

Max devoted his life to the study, advancement and usage of pure Ben-Yehuda Hebrew, and he was certainly one of the world’s top authorities on the subject. Whereas Dola would merge foreign elements into her speech, and adapted, to an extent, to the language’s evolution, Max would not. A telefon was still a sach-rachok, just as Ben-Yehuda decided it should be.

Dola lit up when I asked her if Ben-Yehuda had a sense of humor when he created the modern language. “Oh, yes, definitely! There are many examples of whimsy in his choice of words.” For example? She laughed. “Clitoris. He decided on dagdegan, from the root l’dagdeg, to tickle.”…

Some of Ben-Yehuda’s coinages never became popular, consigned to linguistic curiosity (and to the vocabulary of Max). Only the Ben-Yehuda family ever used the word badura for tomato; milav, for “sport,” was taken from the Arabic, but swiftly became defunct. The oddly foreign-sounding petrozilia prevailed over Ben-Yehuda’s netz halav for parsley. The delightful chen-chen (thank you) was perhaps too genteel for the clamorous nation-in-the-making, but it survived among a few “old-fashioned” speakers, by now winning some popularity as a hip colloquialism—an ironic revival.

Max was able to recount Dola’s childhood just as vividly as she could, because as a member of the Ben-Yehuda “language army,” even as a little girl, she was responsible for helping entrench Hebrew as the local lingo. Dola’s early years, and the language’s, were one and the same.

“Ben-Yehuda would gather the children each evening, and tell them all the new words he had created, or rediscovered. The children were required to pass them on.” Max, a tall, white-haired, coolly Teutonic gentleman, warmed only when speaking about Ben-Yehuda and his language. “Dola was younger, so this was already more established by the time she learned to speak. A child would be sent to the grocer to buy rice. He would ask for orez, and the [Yiddish-speaking] grocer would say ‘vus?’ (what?) The child would then point to the rice and repeat ‘orez‘—that’s how the language, word by word, was first spread.”

A charming story, and I like the fact that the creator of the modern language was unable to impose words the people didn’t want to use.